Ausstellungen

Philip Kojo Metz: The Mimicry Games

Decad presents the exhibition The Mimicry Games by Philip Kojo Metz. The Mimicry Games is an ongoing artwork, begun in 2014, which offers a postcolonial critique of cultures surrounding football in Africa and in Europe. It has to date taken the forms of football match, artist talk and panel discussion.

The first performance within The Mimicry Games took place in Cameroon and included two football teams. Metz’s players wore the 2014 German and French national team jerseys—a gesture towards the Cameroon Campaign fought between German and French forces from 1914 to 1916. The artist then went on to organise two further football matches, with different teams and jerseys, in Senegal and in Burkina Faso.

Metz’s initial interest in the football match lay in a metaphor for battle, particularly in terms of a shared investment in the production of image, the strategies employed, and the importance of collective morale. In addition to the three initial football matches, Metz organised four discussion-based events within this first chapter of The Mimicry Games. Each discussion occurred in conjunction with the screening of one of Metz’s edited videos of his football match.

The group of works exhibited in the storefront at Decad incorporates videos, photographs and textiles, all derived from the initial three football games. Also included is documentation of the discussion-based events organised in parallel by Metz. A third section involves the printed matter first used to advertise, and subsequently to document, this work of many parts. All of the components exhibited at Decad were produced between 2014 and 2016.

Within the public programme in Decad’s Hinterhaus lecture space, Philip Kojo Metz will continue the second chapter of his ongoing work in The Mimicry Games. Lectures will look to Afrofuturism in connection with football, gender, migration and journalism.

In addition to the lectures that extend the project of The Mimicry Games, two further events will be included in the programme. One will take the form of a conversation between Metz and Decad’s founder Rachel Alliston; their talk will centre around the artist as organiser, specifically regarding Metz’s practice, and in line with Alliston’s current research. The second will offer an iteration belonging to a separate series of events organised by Metz, entitled küche’n kino. This entails the screening of a work of video art after which a thematically connected dinner is served, chosen by a guest artist, in this case Emeka Kupeski Okereke.